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To his chagrin, EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl was forced to admit that he is in fact a great lawyer when he was awarded the prestigious California Lawyer of the Year (CLAY) Award for Media Law on Monday evening.

In a high-profile speech and an op-ed in the Financial Times, Microsoft has gone out of its way to attack Google, claiming that Google's Library Project "systematically violates copyright" and that YouTube "knowingly tolerates piracy."

The federal government has taken another step towards forcing you to carry a national ID in order to get on airplanes, open a bank account, enter federal buildings, and much more. But with state legislatures and Congressional representatives increasingly turning against the REAL ID Act, you can help stop this costly, privacy-invasive mandate -- voice your opposition now.

Eighteen months ago, we heard that the controversial proposed WIPO
Broadcasting Treaty was not on the radar of U.S. congressional
representatives. That has changed, thanks to
href="http://action.eff.org/site/Advocacy?id=227">your
letters, and much hard work by
href="http://www.eff.org/IP/WIPO/broadcasting_treaty/NGO_joint_statement_SCCR_S1.pdf">
a broad coalition of public interest NGOs, libraries, ICT industry
groups and CE corporations . Late last week, the Chairman and the
Ranking Republican Member of the key Senate
Judiciary Committee weighed in. They
href="http://eff.org/IP/WIPO/broadcasting_treaty/letter_leahy_specter_pto.pdf">sent a letter to the Register of
Copyrights and Director
of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which make up the U.S.'s
delegation to WIPO, expressing their concern with how the current

Call it the Universal Law of Bad Laws: the more problematic a proposed
piece of legislation is, the keener its advocates are to rush it through. When
that happens, it's often those in the system who call for delay that saves us
all from its unintended consequences.

Praise, then, is due then for
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicola_Zingaretti">Nicola Zingaretti,
the Italian Member of European Parliament (MEP) responsible for guiding the
dangerous Second Intellectual Property Enforcement Directive (
href="http://www.ipred.org/">IPRED2) through the
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament">European
Parliament. Zingaretti called last week for another delay in a key vote by
the EU's Committee on Legal Affairs (
href="http://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/juri_home_en.htm">JURI),
originally scheduled for today.

This last week at WIPO has brought a series of welcome surprises. When the proceedings started on Monday, we had a Chairman who was new to both WIPO and the Development Agenda. The Member States faced a battery of 40 proposals that had to be reconciled into a unified document. To everyone's surprise, that happened by week's end. That WIPO was able to produce such a document is amazing. That the document is a powerful affirmation of many key parts of the original Development Agenda proposal is nothing short of astounding.

In the past, WIPO's process of closed-door "informal" meetings between countries has usually served to weaken strong public interest proposals. But this week, though most of the negotiation happened behind the scenes, the final product contains an array of policies for strengthening development concerns at WIPO. For example: